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evident intellectual voracity impel
him
to adopt an essentially explora–
tory posture in relation to film-making, in which he may answer a
problem raised but not resolved in one film by starting on another.
Still, viewed as a whole, Godard's work is much closer in problems and
scope to a radical purist and formalist in film like Bresson than to the
neorealists - even though the relation with Bresson must be drawn
largely in terms of contrasts.
Bresson also achieved his mature style very quickly, but his career
has throughout consisted of thoroughly premeditated, independent works
conceived within the limits of his personal aesthetic of concision and
intensity. (Born in 1910, Bresson has made eight feature films, the first
in 1943 and the most recent in 1967.) Bresson's art is characterized by
a pure, lyric quality, by a naturally elevated tone and by a carefully
constructed unity. He has said, in an interview conducted by Godard
(Cahiers du Cinema
#178, May, 1966), that for him "improvisation
is at the base of creation in the cinema." But the look of a Bresson film
is surely the antithesis of improvisation. In the finished film, a shot
must be both autonomous and necessary; which means that there's only
one ideally correct way of composing each shot (though it may be
arrived at quite intuitively) and of editing the shots into a narrative. For
all their great energy, Bresson's films project an air of formal deliberate–
ness, of having been organized according to a relentless, subtly calcu–
lated rhythm which required their having had everything inessential
cut from them. Given his austere aesthetic, it seems apt that Bresson's
characteristic subject is a person either literally imprisoned or locked
within an excruciating dilemma. Indeed,
if
one does accept narrative
and tonal unity as a primary standard for film, Bresson's asceticism - his
maximal use of minimal materials, the meditative "closed" quality
of his films - seems to be the only truly rigorous procedure.
Godard's work exemplifies an aesthetic (and, no doubt, a tempera–
ment and sensibility) the opposite of Bresson's. The moral energy in–
forming Godard's film-making, while no less powerful than Bresson's,
leads to a quite different asceticism: the labor of endless self-questioning,
which becomes a constitutive element in the art work. "More and more
with each film," he said in 1965, "it seems to me the greatest problem
in
filming is to decide where and why to begin a shot and why to
end it." The point is that Godard cannot envisage anything but arbit–
rary solutions to his problem. While each shot is autonomous, no amount
of thinking can make it necessary. Since film for Godard is preeminently
an open structure, the distinction between what's essential and inessen–
tial in any given film becomes senseless. Just as no absolute, immanent
